Another recipe post
Drove up to Concord yesterday for a lesson exchange with kythryne. I was having Very Bad Morning, so didn't make it up in time for the arts market, alas, but we did take Kyth's two year old blueberry picking before getting to work.
Write up of the dyeing lesson will wait until my yarn is dry and I have pictures (my car and living room both smell like wet sheep right now), but here are the recipes I taught her.
Aloo Amli
This is my go-to comfort food recipe. I don't actually know its proper name. "Aloo amli" just translates as "potatoes tamarind," its two primary ingredients.
You can purchase tamarind as a paste or sauce in most yuppy grocery stores, but it's considerably cheaper to buy a brick of the dried seed pods at an Indian grocery and reconstitute it yourself. Break the brick into chunks and submerge in a bowl of very hot water. Use just enough water to cover the tamarind, and let soak 20 minutes or so. Then, using your hands, grab pieces of pulp and squeeze them to extract the paste. Your goal here is to get the water and edible fruity bits of the tamarind, discarding the stringy bits, seeds, and shells. The paste should be very thick and very sour.
While the tamarind is soaking, wash and slice a bunch of potatoes into medium slices, about 1/4" thick. Deep fry the potatoes, and set aside. You don't need to fry them until they are all the way cooked -- just enough to crisp the outsides is sufficient.
Heat a teaspoon or so of oil over medium heat, and add a generous portion of mustard seeds (you can use the oil you fried the potatoes in, but let it cool a bit first, lest you burn the mustard). Brown or yellow mustard, doesn't matter, but I have a slight preference for brown. Fry the seeds for 30 seconds or so, then add the tamarind paste and fried potatoes. Simmer until the potatoes are cooked all the way through.
Lamb Biryani
I'm going to be lazy and just re-post a recipe I wrote out a couple years ago:
I don't use a recipe, although occasionally I will read a bunch of recipes at once to get inspiration for modifications to my basic biryani. The way my family taught me to make biryani you need three basic ingredients: rice, meat, and flavors.
Rice for my family is always basmati rice. Short grain rice is right out. In a proper biryani or pilau you want light fluffy rice with each grain separate from the next. It is impossible to get this effect with Uncle Ben's boil in bag, Japanese rice, arborio, Korean, or any of the other million varieties of rice you can find in the grocery store. If you can't find basmati, Thai jasmine rice will do in a pinch, but it is not as light and has a slightly different aroma. I have heard tell from middle eastern friends of mine that there are some Persian varieties of rice that are far superior to basmati but I have never been able to locate any to do a side by side comparison and I am also biased in favor of basmati since that is what I grew up eating on all special occasions.
I almost always use lamb for biryani because I love lamb, however, beef, chicken, fish, or goat would work just as well. You can also make a vegetarian biryani by making potatoes and vegetables instead of meat, but I don't actually know how to cook potatoes for biryani.
For the flavor base I always start out by frying a couple of onions sliced into very thin half moons. I heat fat (oil or butter, depending on your taste) until it is as hot as I can safely heat it, toss in the onions (stand back because they will splatter) and then turn the heat down to low or medium-low and let them cook slowly for about 20-30 minutes or so until they are nice and brown. Then I turn the heat up to medium or medium high and toss in any other aromatics I am using, often garlic and ginger, along with any whole spices I am using, usually cumin seed, and fry for about thirty seconds. Then I throw in all the powdered spices and fry them for another thirty seconds or so.
Next the meat goes in. Ideally the meat will have been marinating in yogurt and more spices overnight. I push all the onions and things to the side and let the meat get seared on all sides. If necessary I turn the heat up in order to brown the meat. Once it is brown all over I add enough water to cover the meat with an inch of water, turn the heat to low, and let it simmer. It needs to simmer long enough for the meat to be tender, at least ninety minutes for cheap cuts of lamb or beef. I check on it every so often to make sure the water hasn't all boiled off. Here you can add other ingredients like carrots, potatoes, whole cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, crushed cardamom pods, fruit.
While the meat cooks, I prepare and boil the rice. The rice needs to be rinsed quite a bit, even if you are buying all organic pesticide-free hydroponic local vegan free range rice because rice is starchy and there are always little bits of rice starch powder in any bag of rice. The starch ruins the texture of the cooked rice and makes it gummy. Wash it by pouring it in a big bowl, and covering it with an inch of cold water. Swish it gently and watch the water get cloudy, then pour off the cloudy water. Repeat until the water becomes dramatically less cloudy - at least three times - before putting the rice in the pot to boil with fresh cold water. I've never measured how much water I use -- it needs to be enough that the rice can't absorb all of it and start to steam cook. I let the rice boil until it is al dente -- about 5 minutes. Then I take the rice off the heat and drain it - gently gently gently - in a sieve.
Once the meat is done simmering, layer about half the rice in a casserole dish. Layer the meat on top of this, and then finish with a layer of rice. If you like you can divide the rice and meat into more than three layers, but once people start serving out of the bowl no one can tell how many layers there were anyway so I think it's not worth the effort. If you like you can add garnishes to the top. I like to sprinkle saffron water (water or milk in which a few thread of saffron have been crumbled and soaked for at least thirty minutes) on top. It's also common to use slivered almonds or pistachios, or edible gold or silver leaf, or sprinkles of dark red food coloring. Seal the casserole dish tightly either with a good tight lid or aluminum foil and toss in a 300F oven to finish cooking the rice in the steam from the curry gravy.
The version that Kyth and I made last night used (in order, from most to least prominent in flavor):
fresh ginger
red chili power
salt
ground coriander seeds
ground cadamom
ground cinnamon
allspice
ground cloves
whole mustard seed
whole fenugreek
We cooked it with lamb and golden sultanas, and a mix of basmati and jasmine rice (because there wasn't quite enough basmati rice in the house to feed three adults).
Zucchini and Summer Squash Sabzi
It's a bit redundant to call this sabzi, since sabzi just means vegetables, but whatever. You can use the following basic outline for just about any vegetable that can be cut into cubes.
Cut the squash into cubes, or slices, or whatever, and sprinkle with several tablespoons of salt, preferably coarse ground such as Kosher salt, to draw out excess water. (Because watery summer squash is disgusting.)
While the squash is resting, slice and saute onions -- we used one and a half large yellow onions for four medium-ish pieces of squash. If you're using fresh spices (minced garlic and ginger, fresh green chilies, that sort of thing) add them when the onions are mostly done and fry them too, about two minutes will do. Once the onions are golden brown, rinse the excess salt off the squash and blotted the pieces dry. Turn the heat up to medium-high, add the spices, let them toast until aromatic, then toss in the squash. Cover and let simmer 5-10 minutes, then remove the lid, because even having pre-salted the squash, they will release a lot of water as they cook, and again, I was aiming for a dry curry. Simmer another 5-10 minutes, longer if you like your veg really really cooked.
I used very simple spices for this, largely to provide a counterpoint to the complex flavors of the biryani:
red chili powder
ground coriander
ground cumin
turmeric
Write up of the dyeing lesson will wait until my yarn is dry and I have pictures (my car and living room both smell like wet sheep right now), but here are the recipes I taught her.
Aloo Amli
This is my go-to comfort food recipe. I don't actually know its proper name. "Aloo amli" just translates as "potatoes tamarind," its two primary ingredients.
You can purchase tamarind as a paste or sauce in most yuppy grocery stores, but it's considerably cheaper to buy a brick of the dried seed pods at an Indian grocery and reconstitute it yourself. Break the brick into chunks and submerge in a bowl of very hot water. Use just enough water to cover the tamarind, and let soak 20 minutes or so. Then, using your hands, grab pieces of pulp and squeeze them to extract the paste. Your goal here is to get the water and edible fruity bits of the tamarind, discarding the stringy bits, seeds, and shells. The paste should be very thick and very sour.
While the tamarind is soaking, wash and slice a bunch of potatoes into medium slices, about 1/4" thick. Deep fry the potatoes, and set aside. You don't need to fry them until they are all the way cooked -- just enough to crisp the outsides is sufficient.
Heat a teaspoon or so of oil over medium heat, and add a generous portion of mustard seeds (you can use the oil you fried the potatoes in, but let it cool a bit first, lest you burn the mustard). Brown or yellow mustard, doesn't matter, but I have a slight preference for brown. Fry the seeds for 30 seconds or so, then add the tamarind paste and fried potatoes. Simmer until the potatoes are cooked all the way through.
Lamb Biryani
I'm going to be lazy and just re-post a recipe I wrote out a couple years ago:
I don't use a recipe, although occasionally I will read a bunch of recipes at once to get inspiration for modifications to my basic biryani. The way my family taught me to make biryani you need three basic ingredients: rice, meat, and flavors.
Rice for my family is always basmati rice. Short grain rice is right out. In a proper biryani or pilau you want light fluffy rice with each grain separate from the next. It is impossible to get this effect with Uncle Ben's boil in bag, Japanese rice, arborio, Korean, or any of the other million varieties of rice you can find in the grocery store. If you can't find basmati, Thai jasmine rice will do in a pinch, but it is not as light and has a slightly different aroma. I have heard tell from middle eastern friends of mine that there are some Persian varieties of rice that are far superior to basmati but I have never been able to locate any to do a side by side comparison and I am also biased in favor of basmati since that is what I grew up eating on all special occasions.
I almost always use lamb for biryani because I love lamb, however, beef, chicken, fish, or goat would work just as well. You can also make a vegetarian biryani by making potatoes and vegetables instead of meat, but I don't actually know how to cook potatoes for biryani.
For the flavor base I always start out by frying a couple of onions sliced into very thin half moons. I heat fat (oil or butter, depending on your taste) until it is as hot as I can safely heat it, toss in the onions (stand back because they will splatter) and then turn the heat down to low or medium-low and let them cook slowly for about 20-30 minutes or so until they are nice and brown. Then I turn the heat up to medium or medium high and toss in any other aromatics I am using, often garlic and ginger, along with any whole spices I am using, usually cumin seed, and fry for about thirty seconds. Then I throw in all the powdered spices and fry them for another thirty seconds or so.
Next the meat goes in. Ideally the meat will have been marinating in yogurt and more spices overnight. I push all the onions and things to the side and let the meat get seared on all sides. If necessary I turn the heat up in order to brown the meat. Once it is brown all over I add enough water to cover the meat with an inch of water, turn the heat to low, and let it simmer. It needs to simmer long enough for the meat to be tender, at least ninety minutes for cheap cuts of lamb or beef. I check on it every so often to make sure the water hasn't all boiled off. Here you can add other ingredients like carrots, potatoes, whole cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, crushed cardamom pods, fruit.
While the meat cooks, I prepare and boil the rice. The rice needs to be rinsed quite a bit, even if you are buying all organic pesticide-free hydroponic local vegan free range rice because rice is starchy and there are always little bits of rice starch powder in any bag of rice. The starch ruins the texture of the cooked rice and makes it gummy. Wash it by pouring it in a big bowl, and covering it with an inch of cold water. Swish it gently and watch the water get cloudy, then pour off the cloudy water. Repeat until the water becomes dramatically less cloudy - at least three times - before putting the rice in the pot to boil with fresh cold water. I've never measured how much water I use -- it needs to be enough that the rice can't absorb all of it and start to steam cook. I let the rice boil until it is al dente -- about 5 minutes. Then I take the rice off the heat and drain it - gently gently gently - in a sieve.
Once the meat is done simmering, layer about half the rice in a casserole dish. Layer the meat on top of this, and then finish with a layer of rice. If you like you can divide the rice and meat into more than three layers, but once people start serving out of the bowl no one can tell how many layers there were anyway so I think it's not worth the effort. If you like you can add garnishes to the top. I like to sprinkle saffron water (water or milk in which a few thread of saffron have been crumbled and soaked for at least thirty minutes) on top. It's also common to use slivered almonds or pistachios, or edible gold or silver leaf, or sprinkles of dark red food coloring. Seal the casserole dish tightly either with a good tight lid or aluminum foil and toss in a 300F oven to finish cooking the rice in the steam from the curry gravy.
The version that Kyth and I made last night used (in order, from most to least prominent in flavor):
fresh ginger
red chili power
salt
ground coriander seeds
ground cadamom
ground cinnamon
allspice
ground cloves
whole mustard seed
whole fenugreek
We cooked it with lamb and golden sultanas, and a mix of basmati and jasmine rice (because there wasn't quite enough basmati rice in the house to feed three adults).
Zucchini and Summer Squash Sabzi
It's a bit redundant to call this sabzi, since sabzi just means vegetables, but whatever. You can use the following basic outline for just about any vegetable that can be cut into cubes.
Cut the squash into cubes, or slices, or whatever, and sprinkle with several tablespoons of salt, preferably coarse ground such as Kosher salt, to draw out excess water. (Because watery summer squash is disgusting.)
While the squash is resting, slice and saute onions -- we used one and a half large yellow onions for four medium-ish pieces of squash. If you're using fresh spices (minced garlic and ginger, fresh green chilies, that sort of thing) add them when the onions are mostly done and fry them too, about two minutes will do. Once the onions are golden brown, rinse the excess salt off the squash and blotted the pieces dry. Turn the heat up to medium-high, add the spices, let them toast until aromatic, then toss in the squash. Cover and let simmer 5-10 minutes, then remove the lid, because even having pre-salted the squash, they will release a lot of water as they cook, and again, I was aiming for a dry curry. Simmer another 5-10 minutes, longer if you like your veg really really cooked.
I used very simple spices for this, largely to provide a counterpoint to the complex flavors of the biryani:
red chili powder
ground coriander
ground cumin
turmeric